I'm a little surprised at how quiet this thread has been, especially since I know some members of this list have been calling for objective criteria for a while.
So let me restate the question to broaden it a bit. If you had a *blue-sky dream* what subjective information would you look at? For example, if you had the resources to scan huge numbers of code repositories, what numbers would you look for? * ranking by LoC under each license * ranking by "projects" under each license * ... ? Similarly, if you could declare objective criteria for textual license analysis and had the time/resources to read all of them, what would those criteria be? e.g., * has/has not been retired by the author * has/has not been obsoleted by a new license published by the same author * has/doesn't have an explicit patent grant * ... ? These examples assume quantitative measures of adoption, the text, and the explicit actions of the author are the only things about a license that can actually be measured, but I am probably thinking small- other examples welcome. [As a reminder, this is not a purely theoretical exercise- I agree with many on this list that a license process based on more objective criteria would be a good thing, and this thread is an effort to explore that issue and start thinking about what such a list might look like.] Luis On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 3:35 PM, Karl Fogel <kfo...@red-bean.com> wrote: > Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flasc...@gatech.edu> writes: >>On 12/05/2012 10:23 AM, Karl Fogel wrote: >>> Luis Villa <l...@tieguy.org> writes: >>>> Anyone else have other suggestions for objective criteria we could >>>> use? I know some folks here have been thinking about this issue for >>>> some time. >>> >>> Number of "forks" of software under a given license on GitHub, adjusted >>> for license popularity across GitHub? (And the equivalent calculation >>> for other sites, where possible.) >> >>That could be misleading, depending on what we want to measure. There >>are a lot of forks doing real work (either true forks, or those that do >>ongoing pull requests to keep synced). >> >>However, there are also people that fork and make one or two changes, or >>none at all. There's nothing wrong with that, it just might not be a >>meaningful metric for this purpose. > > Of course. I meant that as a direction to look in, not as a literal > suggestion of methodology. By number of forks at GitHub, I meant "look > at the forks, using some kind of intelligent criteria, statistical > methods, etc". > > This is non-trivial work, of course. Which is why it is so hard to get > good stats on license popularity and why the notion is rife with > fundamental definitional questions. > _______________________________________________ > License-discuss mailing list > License-discuss@opensource.org > http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss